Bill Leckie reckons ‘there’s something rotten at the very core of R*****s?’ That’s what the Celtic bloggers have been saying for years and he’s only getting it now??

Stop the presses.

Alert the media.

Somebody get a plaque made up.

Bill Leckie of the Scottish Sun has, after careful consideration and many years of diligent study, arrived at a conclusion.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Here it is: “Seems something remains rotten at the very core of R*****s, something that clings to them like a bad smell.”

Well I never.

Give the man a research grant, because he’s cracked it.

I’m going to be honest with you here, I read that line three times to make sure it wasn’t a wind up.

It wasn’t.

Bill Leckie has looked at that club, watched five managers come and go, watched the money get burned, watched the same collapse happen in the same fashion in the same stadium, and he has deduced that something might be wrong.

Something rotten, no less.

Something at the very core.

Bill, mate, we’ve been writing that sentence since 2012.

We’ve been writing it for free, in our spare time, while getting called bitter obsessives for our trouble.

Where exactly have you been?

Because every single Celtic blog in this country has been telling you the same thing for years now.

That it isn’t the manager.

That it isn’t the players.

That it’s the thing underneath all of them that never changes, no matter how many times you paint over it and give it a new name in the dugout.

And every single time we said it, what did we get back from the mainstream?

Bitter. Obsessed. Living rent free. Get a life.

Now here comes Bill in the Sun, saying it in eighty point font, and it’s insight.

It’s analysis.

I’d laugh if I hadn’t heard it a hundred times before.

To be fair to him, and it pains me slightly, the rest of the column is actually decent.

Because credit where it’s due, Leckie doesn’t hedge it once he gets going.

He goes at the empty seats first, and he goes hard: “THEIR fans love to sing about the Blue Sea Of Ibrox. But it’s only on days like today you realise they must mean all those empty seats.”

That’s a good line, and I’m annoyed I didn’t write it.

He points out the cameras have been panning round to a half-empty ground in the closing minutes for years now, and that it didn’t matter whether it was Beale, Clement, Martin, Röhl or now Staunch Del stood in the dugout.

He points out that when Wright’s shot clipped off Rommens and beat Pandur, thousands upon thousands were already up the aisles, because they knew.

They always know.

That’s the bit that gives the game away, and Leckie clocks it: if there was anything about that club, those punters would have stood and roared, because they’d have believed.

They don’t believe.

They haven’t believed for a long, long time.

And how long have we been telling you that, too?

He even lands on the same three games we were laughing about on Sunday night.

I wrote about all of this last night, when the Bearpit was eating itself alive after Hibs turned them over in their own ground.

Three competitive games in, two defeats and a draw, one point on the board, five behind us already, joint second bottom and level with St Mirren, as Leckie helpfully notes.

He also does the sum I was too polite to do.

If both sides win their next three, a defeat at Celtic Park in the first derby puts them eight adrift by mid-September.

Eight.

In September.

Is that a title race, or is that a going away present?

Then he says the quiet part out loud about Emmanuel Fernandez: “Too many players who THINK they’re good but aren’t willing to bust a gut to prove it.”

Fernandez, he says, strolls about with his hands in his pockets while the other lot carve them open – might be a top defender one day, but not in this league, not under this pressure.

Then he widens it out from Cavenagh through McInnes to every single player.

Which, again, is the blog position, word for word, dating back roughly a decade.

Meanwhile we beat Neil McCann’s Kilmarnock 5-1, Kasper Høgh got a hat-trick in his second outing, and Leckie has him down for 30 this season if he stays fit.

He also reckons our board should get the finger out and spend some of what they’re sitting on.

Two out of two, Bill.

You’ll be applying for a ReadCeltic login next.

So welcome aboard, Bill, the water’s lovely.

Look, I’m being harsh, and I’ll own that.

It’s a good column, and there aren’t many in the SMSM who’d write it in those words on a Sunday night.

But you’ll forgive us for not throwing a parade, won’t you?

Because there’s a whole cottage industry of Celtic bloggers who’ve been saying this since the liquidation, and got called every name going for it.

The rot was never the manager.

The rot was never the striker.

The rot is the thing sitting above all of them that nobody in your industry would name.

You’ve got there in the end.

Only fourteen years late.

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